The last time we saw Elizabeth Edwards, her husband, John, had lost an election...and she'd been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. How she's battling back and what she's grateful for now.

On the campaign trail in 2004, Elizabeth Edwards charmed crowds with her down-to-earth friendliness. Neither svelte nor stylish, she was the kind of woman who shopped for bargains and struggled with diets. She also touched people's hearts when they learned that she'd lost her oldest child, Wade, in a car accident when he was only 16.

Then, just before election day, Elizabeth Edwards found out that she had breast cancer. Once the votes were counted, she withdrew from public view to fight her own battle. Now she's regaining her strength and returning to the sunny, child-centered life she once enjoyed, a life she recalls in her new memoir, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers (Broadway Books).

Today, she's unpacking boxes in her family's still-unfinished new house outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A verdant college town, it's known hereabouts as the Southern part of Heaven. If anyone ever deserved a respite in such an earthly paradise, it is Elizabeth Edwards.

Her assistant greets me at the door to the new home, which sits on 100 acres, and leads me along a cardboard path laid out by the builders. In the great room, a floor finisher steers his machine across a gleaming expanse of heart pine. Beyond the French doors, bricklayers are completing a porch and a walkway. The tang of fresh paint sharpens the warm air.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

We find Elizabeth Edwards shoulder-deep in a cardboard box in a sunny room at the end of a hallway. "I hope you don't mind," she says in greeting, "but this is my day to do this room." She is five foot two and wears blue cotton pants, sneakers, and an old green polo shirt. Her kind face is warm and flushed, and her ash-brown hair has been shoved off her forehead. Her light-blue eyes are lovely and quick. Yesterday, looking roughly like this, she was almost — but not quite — recognized at Costco.

"I was standing in the checkout line," she tells me, "and a well-dressed woman turned around, wagged her finger at me, and said, 'We know each other.'"

Elizabeth smiled wanly and replied, "Well...we might."

"You are...?" asked the stylish woman.

"Elizabeth Edwards," said the short, round woman.

"Where have we met?" pondered the well-dressed woman.

"Maybe at a political gathering?" prompted Elizabeth, seeing as her name hadn't registered with her questioner.

"Now why would that be?"

"My husband, John Edwards, was John Kerry's running mate in '04," said Elizabeth.

"Oh my goodness," said the woman, flustered, before turning to pay for her items.

We are in the "project room," Elizabeth tells me now. "You know how whenever you have a project, you camp out in the dining room and make a huge mess everywhere? Now I won't have to do that."

Out of the moving boxes emerges a lifetime of leftover crafts. Here is a sealed plastic storage box of styrofoam balls. Here comes one full of pipe cleaners and another for wooden clothespins and another rattling with plastic Corinthian columns. "These," she announces, extracting a stack of forest-green styrofoam bases, "are great for dioramas." Next is a pillar of small waxed-paper cups, each one containing a single color of leftover glitter, one inserted into the next.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Finding some tin buttons reminds her of something: "I didn't win the button maker on eBay today!" she cries, vexed. "I took a phone call when the button maker was closing, and I lost it."

From years of seasonal and holiday arts-and-crafts projects, one stands out in her memory. For Halloween, for Wade and eight of his friends, Elizabeth and the other mothers sprayed nine sweat suits with non-water-soluble glue and planted fast-growing grass seed in the glue. Each sweat suit was hung inside a plastic dry cleaning bag, and each mom misted one every day for two weeks. ("Well, Walker Hobbs's mother did not mist it every day, and it got bald spots," says Elizabeth. "But we just spread sand over the bald spots for Walker.") For trick-or-treating, each boy wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt bristling with fresh green grass and a cap topped by a pennant, displaying a number, one through nine.

They were a golf course.

Elizabeth Edwards has been fated to enjoy such ordinary, whimsical moments of family life intermittently, rather than permanently, so they are more than ordinarily precious to her. Her new book is in part a celebration of the mundane happiness that most parents take for granted, that Elizabeth took for granted until the day she lost it.

Born into a military family in 1949, Mary Elizabeth Anania moved frequently when she was young; she and her younger brother and sister spent much of their childhood in Japan. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went on to law school there. A friend insisted on setting her up on a blind date with a fellow law student named John Edwards, and she never dated anyone else again. The couple married three days after taking the North Carolina State bar exam in 1977. "At our wedding," she says, "we talked about wanting children and about wanting to be of service to the greater community." Son Lucius Wade was born in 1979, and daughter Catharine (Cate) followed in 1982. Elizabeth worked as a commercial-litigation lawyer and basked in this time of family happiness and contentment.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

On April 4, 1996, Wade was driving his car to the family beach house, with a friend in the passenger seat. Suddenly, a gust of wind came up, and the car flipped over. Wade was not speeding, and he hadn't taken a drink. But he was killed instantly. His friend was spared.

In her book, Elizabeth provides a shattering description of how she got the news. She was at home with her husband and daughter, packing to go to the beach house, when she saw a state trooper's car pull up.

It could be only one thing, she thought. She walked to the door, opened it, and said to the officer: "Tell me he's alive."

She refused to admit him or to answer any questions until the trooper pronounced those words.

He could not.

Elizabeth never worked another day at her office. She spent all day every day next to John. She devoted herself to caring for Wade's grave, and — over time — to the grave sites of other children, some of whom had died many years earlier and whose own mothers had since died. Meanwhile, Cate, 14, started sleeping in her parents' bedroom.

A marriage can fall apart after the death of a child, Elizabeth is telling me during a break in her unpacking. How did she and her husband avoid that fate? "We were lucky," she replies. "We grieved the same way."

Often, she explains, it's harder on fathers, because men are expected to be stoic. A bereft mother can collapse and turn to empathetic friends; a man is supposed to buck up. As a result, many men return to work too early or become stuck in denial or turn to alcohol or other diversions to kill the pain. But John stayed by Elizabeth's side, and they wept together. "You almost want to torture yourself, to blame," she reflects. "But it was hard to find ways to torture ourselves. We bought Wade the car. But we'd done the research — we bought a safe car."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Elizabeth learned there is no correct way to survive the loss of a child, only desperate coping mechanisms. "You're in too much agony to stay where you are," she tells me, "but you don't want to move past him. It's a terrible paradox.

"People find it a great blessing if their child left behind a child. Our blessing was, we had Wade for 16 wonderful years. We got to know him. My heart goes out to the grieving parents who lost their two-year-old or their newborn...."

In Wade's memory, Elizabeth and John founded a computer lab adjacent to the high school, available to students without home computers. Both volunteered there. "I discovered that it helped me to do something for other people," she says. "It honored Wade without negating my loss of him." Elizabeth also took comfort from online bereavement groups.

Eventually, she grew desperate to recapture a trace of family happiness. Still full of the need to parent, she turned, at 46, to fertility specialists. In 1998, Emma Claire was born; in 2000, when Elizabeth was 50, she gave birth to Jack.

Now eight and six, Emma Claire and Jack come romping in from school, sweaty and rosy-cheeked. They are two blond whirlwinds, dumping their backpacks, kicking off their shoes, and running to look into Mama's project boxes. They need hugs and snacks and maybe a story and certainly a hike to the new his-and-her tree houses going up on the property. Yearning to finish stocking the new project room, Elizabeth asks the babysitter to take the children to the tree houses; she will meet up with the kids later.

"Promise, Mommy?" wheedles Emma Claire.

"Promise," says Elizabeth. Jack flies out the door, and Emma Claire skips behind him, and the babysitter scoops up backpacks and shoes and jogs out after them.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Both children play on the same local baseball team. Recently, brother and sister were in the outfield — Emma Claire in center, Jack in right field — when a ball was hit toward Emma Claire. "The ball goes to her," Elizabeth recounts, "but Jack isn't impressed with her fielding and throwing skills, so he tries to intercept it. They tussle over the ball. Three runs have scored, and my children are wrestling in the outfield over the ball. We lost by one run."

In 1997, 20 years after John and Elizabeth Edwards were married, they got their chance to serve the greater community. John, by now a successful trial lawyer, was elected the junior senator from North Carolina. In 2004, John lost the Democratic primary race for president, then was invited by John Kerry to be his running mate.

Elizabeth hit the campaign trail with her two younger children (by this time, daughter Cate was in college at Princeton). Audiences everywhere laughed and clapped when Jack and Emma Claire stampeded across the stage and into their parents' arms. At the convention, Elizabeth relates, little Jack was dismayed at the sight of all the signs in the hall with his father's name on them. "Where are the signs with my name?" he asked his mother.

"I loved campaigning," Elizabeth says now. "It was a rare day that I didn't have fun. What a way to see America!"

On October 21, 2004, Elizabeth Edwards was suddenly whipped around again and flung without warning back into deep space.

Standing under the water of her hotel shower, she traced the edges of an undeniable lump in her right breast. She had a full day ahead on the campaign trail. But, as she writes in her book, "I had learned long ago that it was typically the most ordinary days when the careful pieces of life can break away and shatter."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

How often had she prayed and fantasized that she could have died in Wade's place? Now she worried about her husband and children more than herself. "For Cate, for John, and for the children, I admit I was afraid to lose this fight," she writes. "But it wasn't, by a sad and huge distance, the worst news we had ever heard."

After losing the election, the Edwardses returned home to Raleigh, North Carolina, with suitcases full of dirty clothes, and Elizabeth started the first of 20 loads of laundry. The lurch back into postelection life was surreal, accompanied as it was by breast cancer. A CAT scan revealed a spot on Elizabeth's liver and the possibility that the cancer had metastasized.

But an MRI revealed the spot on her liver to be benign, and Elizabeth began a regime of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, her husband by her side. "We just threw ourselves into it," John Edwards recalled in a recent interview with Newsweek. Elizabeth, like so many breast cancer survivors before her, discovered that the lifesaving treatments could be debilitating.

During her chemotherapy, Elizabeth agreed to participate in a clinical study that involved additional testing. It was a way, she says in her book, of repaying the brave women who had come before her and helping those who would come after. As such, she writes, "it was oddly like cleaning the graves of children buried near Wade after their mothers had died."

It has been two years since her diagnosis, and the treatment has left some aftereffects: "My body is telling me at times that I'm exhausted," she says, "and I'm gaining weight." But the good news is, the cancer seems to be gone.

John Edwards is in the process of deciding whether to reenter the political fray in pursuit of the 2008 presidential nomination, and his wife says she's ready for the rigors of another national campaign.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"Absolutely!" she proclaims. "It would be a privilege."

The project room in her new home sits across the hall from a playroom with floor-to-ceiling shelving that she has begun to stock with children's books. A computer alcove with built-in desks awaits future homework nights. Spacious bedrooms are in the finishing stages for all three Edwards children. (Cate is now starting Harvard Law School.) Each bedroom overlooks the unfinished red clay of the yard and the pinewoods in the distance. The wall colors and the tiles are whimsical and lovely. "And you won't believe the fabrics!" Elizabeth exclaims.

There is an outside dog run for two dogs not yet acquired but promised to Jack and Emma Claire. When the house is complete, there will be a sewing room and a locked space for storing gifts and a wardrobe closet full of costumes. Elizabeth notes that there is also a nook off the master bedroom, "so that when I have insomnia, I can tiptoe and check my e-mail without waking John."

The house is somehow both vast and modest in its intentions — spacious and airy, yet clearly designed for the rearing of children and for the gathering of friends (and possibly campaign staffs). Perhaps Elizabeth Edwards believes that once everything is installed, once childhood fun and make-believe and games and stories and happiness are built in here, on this land, cemented and plastered and painted and tiled, no one and nothing will ever take them away from her again.

Melissa Fay Greene's newest book is There Is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury), about Ethiopia's AIDS orphans. Some of the material originally appeared in this magazine.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Good Housekeeping participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.